Television

Saturday, October 1, 2016

GateHouse: Crime makes a comeback on national stage

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

September 30, 2016

Criminal justice issues have long been ignored by
national candidates.

Unlike the days of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush and, of course, Bill Clinton, crime has not been on the
national radar. The reason is simple, violent crime has fallen to unprecedented
lows.

But crime — or at least the rhetoric of crime — is
back in the presidential race.

During Monday’s presidential debate Donald Trump
pledged to bring stop-and-frisk to every town in America. Hillary Clinton said
the courts have declared stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. Trump retorted
stop-and-frisk was behind the dramatic decline in NYC murders, Clinton said
murder is still falling in NYC.

They are both wrong.

Stop-and-frisk is a practice in which police
officers stop and question a person based on reasonable suspicion and frisk
that person for weapons.

In 2013, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called
NYC’s stop-and-frisk tactics “indirect racial profiling.” The police used the
tactic more than 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. The vast majority of
the stops were of blacks, 52 percent, and Hispanics, 31 percent.

Judge Scheindlin did not say that stop-and-frisk was
unconstitutional. She couldn’t. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear
in Terry v. Ohio that stop-and-frisk was constitutional.

Judge Scheindlin instead focused on NYC’s tactics, “In
their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have
willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right
people’ is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States
Constitution.”

Nowhere has the decline in violent crime been more
startling than in New York City. According to the New York Times, there were
2,272 victims of murder in the NYC in 1990 — in 2015, there were 352. There are
a number of theories as to why violent crime fell so dramatically. Some suggest
that at the height of the surge in violent crime, crack cocaine dominated the
streets. As crack fell out of vogue, violent crime fell as well.

There is also the “broken windows” theory introduced
in 1982 when criminologist John Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published an
article in The Atlantic Monthly. The broken windows theory is simple. If one
window is broken in a building and left unrepaired, soon all the other windows
would be broken and crime would take over allowing violence to become
pervasive. The solution? Crime can be controlled if neighborhoods are
maintained.

In 1994, when Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor of
NYC, violent crime was out of control. He hired William Bratton who had used
some of Wilson’s ideas as the chief of the New York City Transit Police. The
results were remarkable. New York’s success can also be attributed to
efficiency and innovation.

The New York
Times reported that former Police Commissioner Raymond M. Kelly said, “success
can be traced to eight years of programs like Operation Impact, which attacks
stubborn crime plateaus, and the Real Time Crime Center, which feeds detectives
instant intelligence.”

Murder in New York City increased six percent
between 2014 and 2015. Although, according toPolitifact.com murder is down in the last week, last
month and last 12 months. As a result, the New York Daily News which wrote
after Scheindlin’s decision, “Make no mistake — Scheindlin has put New York
directly in harm’s way with a ruling that threatens to push the city back
toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed,” rescinded its position.

In a recent editorial, The Daily News wrote, “We are
delighted to say that we were wrong.”

NYC police scaled back stops under former Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and accelerated the process under Mayor Bill de Blasio. As a
result, the number of stops reported by the police fell 97 percent from a high
of 685,700 in 2011 to 22,900 in 2015.

Not only did crime fail to rise, New York’s crime
rate continues to hit record lows.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg,
Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010,” was
recently released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him atmattmangino.comand
follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.